For Microsoft, the traditional desktop is old news. It's on its way out, it's legacy, and the harder they claim the desktop has equal rights, the sillier it becomes. With companies, words are meaningless, it's actions that matter, and here Microsoft's actions tell the real story. The company has announced the product line-up for Visual Studio 11, and the free Express can no longer be used to create desktop applications. Message is clear.

"Maybe in a singled threaded world, but most multi threaded applications are consuming CPU resources while minimized."

Certainly an app can spawn threads that consume large amounts of CPU time in the background, however it's likely that these threads are just reacting to more events such as network activity or topping up audio buffers. If you have a music player or P2P app, then running it in the background is often exactly what the user wants (who wants to stare at the P2P screen all day?). Can we say a background application is wasting energy when it's doing what the user wants in the background instead of the foreground?

I think the bigger problem is applications that waste cycles in the background doing non-productive things. One example I'm thinking of now is a game that keeps running even when minimized, but I really don't know if this is a common problem in practice.

"CPU utilization is just one facet, there's stuff like utilizing the network which can prevent the PC from entering low power states for the network card which becomes a concern. Same thing with audio playback."

Well yes, but if the user is playing music or downloading files, he probably doesn't want his device to go to sleep until those tasks are done. I wouldn't classify these things as wasteful when the application is doing what the user wants it to do.

I have to wonder whether shutting everything down in the background (win32s or not) would cause frustration that applications can't do work in the background (like downloading, teleconfrencing, music, etc). If an OS permits these 3rd party background tasks, then I don't see why win32 is worse than alternatives. If it does not, then it should be possible to suspend a win32 application while it is backgrounded.

"I think Metro, with OS managed background tasks (which have strict resource caps and policy imposed) are a great middle ground between battery efficiency and multitasking."

Not to deny this, but I'm not seeing why this excludes the win32s. Although it may seem that way, I'm not really trying to promote win32s, but I'm not convinced their depreciation was motivated by poor resource utilization. I suspect that resource utilization in desktop apps won't be much different than their metro counterparts. Now I might be all wrong, but I haven't seen anything technical to convince me otherwise.